Live Coverage Of The First Democratic Debate

To reiterate Harry’s point about the Iraq War: Foreign policy just isn’t all that important to voters unless the country is in the midst of a major conflict. And that’s especially true for Democrats. In a Quinnipiac University poll released in July, just 13 percent of Democrats said foreign policy or terrorism was their most important issue. By contrast, 24 percent of independents and 32 percent of Republicans did so.

One of Lincoln Chafee’s main reasons for being in the race is that he voted against the Iraq War while Hillary Clinton voted for it. The Iraq War may have helped to bring down Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, but it’s a different time. Back then, 21 percent of Democrats said the Iraq War was the most important issue. When Chafee announced his campaign, just 3 percent did.

Hillary Clinton is touting her experience as an adviser to Obama, which is smart — according to a Pew poll released earlier this month, 61 percent of possible Democratic primary voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate with plans similar to Obama’s, while just 12 percent said they would be less likely, indicating that Clinton needs to be particularly strategic about where she distances herself from the president. So far, her notable departures from the president have been her stance against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, advocating for a no-fly zone over Syria and repealing the Obamacare “Cadillac tax.”

One of the biggest issues for candidates during this debate is avoiding pissing off traditional Democratic constituencies. So far: Webb’s affirmative action comments could hurt with black voters (not that his numbers among the demo are statistically significant); Sanders’ waffling on gun control could hurt with “soccer moms” (as horrid as that term is) and, frankly, lots of Dem voters. Sanders voted against the Brady bill, as pointed out by Clinton. But he only gets a D- from the NRA. No obvious unforced errors elsewhere, I think …

When the Brady bill (gun control) was passed in 1993, 65 percent of Democrats supported stricter gun control versus 25 percent in favor of supporting gun rights per the Pew Research Center. Today, it’s 73 percent for stricter gun control versus 25 percent for supporting gun rights.

Hillary Clinton repeated her call for more gun sales to be covered by background checks. She said earlier this month that she would require sellers of a “significant number of guns” to be licensed federally, which would require them to check the backgrounds of their buyers. Clinton and President Obama, who is considering the same policy change, haven’t specified where they’d set the threshold for sales. One reason: The government doesn’t have all the gun-sales data it would need to formulate the licensing policy. Federal law requires licenses for sellers who “engage in the business” of selling firearms. The law and the regulation that defines it don’t specify a minimum number of sales that qualifies a dealer as engaging in the business, so it allows sellers at gun shows, online, at flea markets or among friends to avoid getting a license and taking on the responsibility it imposes. Just how many guns are sold by unlicensed dealers? No one is really sure. You might have heard that 40 percent of guns are sold by private, unlicensed dealers. That’s based on a 1994 National Institute of Justice survey that was answered by just 251 gun owners. We don’t even know how many guns licensed dealers sell. Our best data is over 20 years old. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives surveyed licensed dealers in 1992 and 1993 and found that 3 in 4 sold 10 or fewer guns a year. But since then the number of licensees has dropped by more than half, likely as low-volume sellers have left the program. An ATF spokeswoman wasn’t immediately aware of more recent dealer surveys.

Welcome to tonight’s installment of “Did Harry Enten Say This About The Debate Or About The Mets Game?” Can you identify which of these things Harry said out loud at the television showing the MLB playoffs, or the one showing the debate? “The problem is that there’s just no depth.” “You can see they’re getting desperate. Taking a lot of big, wild swings because their back is against the wall.” “This is depressing.”

Yes, Micah. Webb has a moderate record when Democratic voters are becoming increasingly liberal. Moreover, the percentage of white moderate and conservative voters is really shrinking.

Harry, Anderson Cooper’s right that Webb is out of step with the current Democratic Party, right?

So far, the crowd in Las Vegas seems fairly pro-Clinton, although with considerable pockets of support for Sanders. (And almost no support for the other three candidates on stage.) Not a huge surprise, since Clinton and Sanders are also the top two candidates in the polls — but it still makes what they say sound a lot better to viewers at home. Sometimes, stacking a crowd can also be one of the ways that “the party decides” (or at least influences) the nomination race in favor of establishment-backed candidates. Mitt Romney, for instance, benefited from a loyal audience in his critical debate against Rick Santorum in Arizona in 2012.

Not to kick Martin O’Malley when he’s down, but Maryland Democrats don’t think particularly highly of him at this point. In a recent Goucher College poll, O’Malley registered only 2 percent in the Democratic presidential primary among Maryland Democrats.

A lot of references to ideology so far (“Democratic socialist,” “progressive,” “a block of granite”). Here’s where the candidates stand with different ideological factions:

Anderson Cooper suggested to Bernie Sanders that Americans might not be willing to elect a “socialist.” He’s referring to a June 2015 Gallup poll in which 50 percent of Americans said they could not vote for a socialist. To give you an idea of how high that is, only 7 percent of Americans said they could never vote for an African-American.

Hillary Clinton was just asked about her changing opinion on “the trade deal.” She’s talking about the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal between 12 countries, including the U.S., that collectively make up 40 percent of the world’s economy. Negotiators came to an agreement earlier this month, but the U.S. Congress will still have to vote “yes” or “no” on the deal early next year. Clinton supported the deal while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state but came out against the deal last week. She cited labor conditions for U.S. workers, currency manipulation (which isn’t part of the agreement), and increased pharmaceutical monopolies as reasons.

Bernie Sanders just mentioned unemployment and incarceration rates among minorities. That makes sense for Sanders, who continues to trail Clinton by large percentages among blacks and Latino Democrats. This debate, as I brought up yesterday, gives Sanders a golden chance to appeal to these core Democratic constituencies.

Along with everyone else, I’m interested in seeing how the moderators, Hillary Clinton and her opponents talk about the email server story. But I’m less keen on the details of the case and more on watching it as an indicator of how we talk about technology and data. We don’t have very strong collective language around these issues, and it often devolves into fear-mongering. Let’s see if we can get to a productive line of questioning.

You’re hearing a lot from the candidates about income inequality. That shouldn’t be too surprising given that only 33 percent of Democrats believe that anyone can get ahead versus 65 percent who believe that just a few people at the top have a chance to get ahead, according to a May 2015 CBS News/New York Times poll. Moreover, 89 percent of Democrats believe that money and wealth should be distributed more evenly.

Somewhat to my surprise — and, yes, frustration — both of the first two Republican debates largely avoided much discussion of the economy. Based on the first few minutes of tonight’s debate, it doesn’t look like the Democrats will do the same. All the candidates’ opening statements hit on economic issues, particularly the stagnation of middle-class incomes. That’s no surprise. Bernie Sanders, after all, has made the economy — and, in particular, income inequality — the central issue of his campaign. Martin O’Malley has likewise focused on wage stagnation and the middle class. You can bet both of them will hit those themes early and often in tonight’s debate. Things are a bit trickier for Hillary Clinton. She, too, has made economic opportunity an important part of her campaign; in a major speech in July, she called for more infrastructure spending, paid family leave and tax policies that encourage companies to share their profits with employees. But she hasn’t gone as far as some of her opponents in embracing policies supported by her party’s liberal base. I’ve already noted her opposition to a $15 national minimum wage. Similarly, her college plan aims to eliminate student debt, but Sanders has gone further, pledging to make public college completely free. Clinton has called for tighter regulation of Wall Street, but she hasn’t endorsed re-imposing the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of investment and commercial banking, as Sanders and O’Malley have. And Clinton is generally far more in favor of free trade than her more liberal opponents. All of those positions could hurt Clinton in the primary, but they could also serve her well in the general election, assuming she gets there. The tougher question could be how to handle President Obama’s economic record. On the one hand, the economy is unquestionably better today than when Obama took office. Obama has overseen a period of remarkably consistent job growth (October’s jobs report marked five straight years of monthly employment gains), and the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since before the recession. On the other hand, that job growth has been accompanied by stagnant wages and has left millions of Americans on the economy’s sidelines. That record will pose a challenge for any Democratic nominee, but particularly for Clinton, who served in the Obama administration (albeit as secretary of state) and is more closely tied to his record than the other declared candidates. (That would change, of course, if Joe Biden entered the race.) Clinton does have one potential ace up her sleeve: her husband’s term of office, which coincided with the best economy many voters have ever experienced. (People who graduated from college the year Bill Clinton took office are now in their early 40s.) The unemployment rate was 4.2 percent when Bill Clinton left office (it is 5.1 percent today), and middle-class incomes were rising rapidly, a sharp contrast not just with today’s anemic growth but also with the disappointing gains of the mid-2000s. Clinton has often seemed reluctant to tie herself too closely to her husband, but it will be worth watching whether she refers back to his economic success in tonight’s debate.

https://twitter.com/ShrimpSalon/status/654003902464040966 Good question. We don’t know for sure what will happen tonight, but we can look at the most recent comparable primary debates. ESPN Research sent us breakdowns of viewers for the last Democratic debate of the 2008 primary and the two Republican debates this summer. Viewers of the last Democratic primary debate were whiter than Americans as a whole at the time, though not as white as the audiences for this year’s Republican debates. Here are the numbers for that 2008 debate and the most recent Republican primary debate:

VIEWERS	APRIL 2008 DEMOCRATS	SEPT. 2015 REPUBLICANS
Female	57%	49%
Male	43	51
Median Age	56	60
Non-Hispanic white	73	81
Non-Hispanic black	16	8
Non-Hispanic other	6	5
Hispanic	5	6
Median household income	$59,600	$73,700

Of the 10.7 million viewers who watched the Democratic debate in Philadelphia on April 16, 2008, 73 percent were non-Hispanic whites, compared with 74 percent of voters in the 2008 election and 66 percent of Americans that year. But most non-white viewers were non-Hispanic blacks: They made up 16 percent of viewers of the debate, compared with 13 percent of voters and 12 percent of Americans. And, while you asked only about race, we also looked at other demographics: 57 percent of viewers were women, compared to 53 percent of voters and 51 percent of Americans. The median age of viewers was 56, about two decades older than the average American. The two Republican debates so far this year — August’s on Fox News and September’s on CNN — drew audiences with similar demographics, both quite different from the country as a whole, and from cable viewers. Fox’s 24 million viewers were 85 percent non-white Hispanic, compared with 81 percent of CNN’s 23.1 million viewers but just 68 percent of Americans and 65 percent of prime-time cable viewers. And 12 percent of the country is non-Hispanic black, compared with 15 percent of prime-time cable viewers but just 6 percent of Fox’s debate audience and 8 percent of CNN’s. Each debate had an audience that was roughly 51 percent male, with a median age of 60 — 10 years older than for all prime-time cable viewers. So will tonight’s audience look more like the one that watched in 2008, or that has tuned in to the two debates this year? It could go either way. The last Democratic primary debate was over seven years ago and featured an African-American candidate, Barack Obama. Also, presumably many of the viewers of the Republican debate are interested in the Democratic primary, too. On the other hand, polls show Hillary Clinton is much more popular with black and Hispanic voters than the Republican candidates are — and she also featured in that 2008 debate. As for age, even if the viewers for tonight’s debate are as old as those for the Republican debates, they’ll be younger than the five featured Democratic candidates, whose average age is 65.

Chris K, I think Biden’s time is running out. No one has entered this late relative to the other candidates and gone on to win the nomination. Moreover, Biden cannot count on a bounce after any announcement. That’s bad news for a candidate that is running in third place nationally and in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I’m interested in what sub-constituencies of the Democratic base the different candidates speak to. This is an AP exit poll with gender and race breakdowns for 2012 voters. President Obama got 42 percent of white women’s votes in 2012 — a significant minority — while holding on to other demographic groups considered strong with Democrats (unions, African-Americans). It’s up to the Democratic nominee to repeat and/or tweak the formula of a strong minority of white women + many other demos likely – a larger majority of white men. Sanders may attract some voters who have sat out elections because they don’t feel any major party candidate is committed enough to change. But is that enough to change the ranks of primary voters?

The race that comes to mind, @pbglaser, is 2000. Right now, Clinton is over 50 percent in polls nationally (without Biden), while leading by less in Iowa and trailing in New Hampshire. In October 1999, Al Gore was clearing 50 percent nationally and was leading Bill Bradley by about 25 percentage points. Gore’s lead was smaller in Iowa, and Bradley was ahead in New Hampshire.

One topic to watch for in tonight’s debate: raising the minimum wage. It’s one that’s gotten a lot of attention in recent months amid stagnant earnings and evidence that low-wage jobs have become increasingly difficult to escape. And, perhaps surprisingly, it’s an area where there is real disagreement among the leading candidates. These are Democrats, so pretty much everyone on stage supports a higher minimum wage. (Jim Webb hasn’t taken a position; Lincoln Chafee hasn’t either but as governor of Rhode Island signed a bill raising the state’s minimum to $9 an hour.) But they disagree about how much. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have fully embraced the “Fight for $15” movement’s demand for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage; Sanders earlier this year introduced a $15 minimum wage bill in the Senate. Hillary Clinton, however, has been more cautious. For months, she said she supported raising the wage but avoided specifying a dollar figure. In July, she endorsed a $12 an hour minimum while also saying that cities should be free to set their own, higher wage floors, as many have already done. “There are different economic environments,” Clinton said in New Hampshire earlier this summer. “And what you can do in L.A. or New York may not work in other places.” Clinton is right, of course, that $15 an hour doesn’t go nearly as far in New York as it does in, say, Buffalo. And even some reliably liberal economists and commenters have been skeptical of mandating a nationwide $15 minimum. But Clinton’s position hasn’t played well on the left, where a $15 minimum wage has become a major rallying cry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she has tended to downplay the issue; her big economic policy speech in July hardly even mentioned the minimum wage. It will be interesting to see how Clinton handles the issue tonight and to what extent her rivals go after her on it.

Four weeks ago, I wrote about how Hillary Clinton was stuck in a “poll-deflating feedback loop.” News coverage of a trio of negative storylines for Clinton — the scandal over her email sever, Joe Biden’s potential entry into the race, and her declining poll numbers — were reinforcing one another. (For instance, poor polls for Clinton lead to more speculation about Biden running — which in turn tend to harm Clinton’s poll numbers further.) If the cycle continued on beyond a certain point, it would eventually cost her the Democratic nomination. But it probably wouldn’t, I wrote. Indeed, since we published that story on Sept. 16, the tone of Clinton’s coverage has changed quite a bit. Instead of almost uniformly negative coverage, Clinton has had a more even mix: six days’ worth of negative stories, five days’ worth of neutral stories, and three days’ worth of positive stories, according to data compiled by my colleague Ritchie King.

And guess what? Clinton’s decline in the polls has halted, at least for now, as Harry Enten pointed out earlier tonight. Just what are these more favorable (or at least neutral) storylines for Clinton lately? It’s a mix of everything, from increased skepticism over whether Biden will run, to Kevin McCarthy’s “Kinsley gaffe” in discussing the political motivations behind the GOP’s Benghazi committee hearings, to Clinton’s “Saturday Night Live” appearance, to the occasional favorable story about Clinton’s polls. Do all of these stories seem pretty trivial to you? Of course they are! And that’s sort of the point. The fundamentals of the race don’t change all that much from day to day, and they’ve been particularly stable in the Democratic race. But that’s a boring story to write about. So the media tends to tie two or three trivial stories together (sometimes in companion with a nontrivial story) into part of a larger narrative about a candidate’s “momentum.” That “fake” narrative can have real effects on the polls, however, since voters still aren’t paying all that much attention at this stage of the race. They may pick up on the tone and tenor of coverage, rather than examining the substance. In any event, it’s possible that we’ll start to see some “Clinton comeback” stories soon, especially if she performs well in tonight’s debate. It’s perhaps equally possible that the “Clinton in disarray!” narrative will re-emerge if she performs poorly. It may not take all that much — perhaps just a single gaffe, for instance — for the media to choose one narrative over another and then find all sorts of “evidence” to reinforce it. Ordinarily, we’d say that none of this is likely to matter all that much in the end. The short term might matter more than usual this time around, however, since Biden soon has to decide about whether to enter the race.

It’s difficult to predict a trend and perhaps even more difficult to predict when a trend will stop. But it seems that for now, the polling numbers have stabilized for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and tonight’s missing man, Joe Biden. We can see this best in the Huffington Post Pollster.com aggregate of the Democratic primary:

Clinton dropped from 61 percent after announcing her candidacy on April 15 to 44 percent by Sept. 20. During the same period, Sanders jumped from 8 percent to 25 percent, and Biden climbed from 10 percent to 19 percent. Today, Clinton is at 46 percent, Sanders is at 24 percent and Biden is at 19 percent. Just what has happened over the past month to stabilize the numbers? And will it last? First, Clinton has been able to hold on to her base of minority voters. According to the latest polling from YouGov, for example, Clinton is winning 56 percent of African-Americans and 55 percent of Latinos. In contrast, she’s winning 42 percent of white voters. Sanders, on the other hand, was at 13 percent with Latinos and 8 percent with African-Americans in the same poll. As I noted on Monday, part of that may be because they don’t know who he is (and tonight’s debate might help remedy that). The more troublesome interpretation if you’re a Sanders fan: Non-white voters don’t like his message. Second, Clinton’s poll numbers plummeted amid a flood of negative media coverage. That flood has slowed (Nate’s going to get into this in a moment). So, two questions for tonight:

1. Can Sanders use the debate to turn his numbers around with non-white voters?
2. Can Clinton make it through tonight without sparking another round of negative press?

Here’s where the candidates are in the key early states heading into tonight’s debate:

We’ll find out tonight if television viewers are as interested in watching Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as they have been in watching Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and the rest of the massive Republican presidential field. Each of the two GOP debates this summer — Fox’s in August and CNN’s in September — drew more than 23 million viewers, according to Nielsen data provided to us by ESPN Research. That’s more than double the number who tuned in to any one of 54 primary debates ahead of the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections for which we have data. Clinton has helped draw a crowd before: The April 2008 debate in Philadelphia that included her and then-Sen. Barack Obama drew 10.7 million viewers, then a record.

There are several interesting storylines heading into the first Democratic presidential debate, which is being held tonight in Las Vegas and is hosted by CNN and Facebook. The Democratic primary hasn’t been nearly as contentious as the GOP’s; Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders rarely mention each other by name on the trail, but they’ll be side-by-side on stage tonight. And can Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb or Lincoln Chafee do something to jump out of obscurity? We’ll start live-blogging in earnest at 8:30 p.m. Send us your questions on Twitter @FiveThirtyEight or in the comments to the right. Stay tuned.